May 12, 2003

Digital Freedom Update

The Tennessee Digital Freedom Network has the latest schedule of legislative committee hearings on HB 457 and SB 213, the legislation pushed by the Motion Picture Association of America and the cable teevee industry that will, if not stopped, severely curtail your freedom to use digital media - hardware and content - in the way you see fit. It's a developing story that one of Nashville's two daily newspapers has chosen to ignore, even though it involves your privacy rights and your "fair use" rights under federal copyright law, and your First Amendment rights. Opposition to the legislature ranges from conservatives and libertarians to the Tennessee chapter of the left-wing American Civil Liberties Union.

UPDATE: The Nashville City Paper, which is covering the story, is getting letters to the editor about it. (Scroll down to the second letter.)

UPDATE #2: The author of the BusinessLawyer blog has a fine summation of the issue at stake: "The real issue is not whether you are for copyright laws, patents and intellectual property protection in general, it's how far do you want to go to protect what is very difficult to protect without invading people's homes to see if they are re-editing their DVD of The Matrix." (If the link doesn't work, just go here and look for the earliest entry on Monday, May 12. Blogger, you know, sucks.)